IT’S ALL IN THE CUT
Three-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis got so much into the head of his character in his latest film that he is switching careers, writes
As one of Britain’s most acclaimed actors, Daniel DayLewis’s decision to retire from acting was as shocking as it was baffling. The winner of three Academy Awards for best actor astounded the film industry earlier this year when he issued a statement declaring that Phantom Thread would be his last film. Now, in his latest interview, the 60-yearold star has revealed how the film about London’s fashion industry in the 1950s had left him “overwhelmed” with sadness.
In the interview with W magazine, DayLewis said that when he started out in the film he had not expected it to be his last.
Explaining how he and Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of Phantom Thread, had both been affected by it, he said: “Paul and I laughed a lot before we made the movie. And then we stopped laughing because we were both overwhelmed by a sense of sadness. That took us by surprise: we didn’t realise what we had given birth to. It was hard to live with. And still is.”
He said the statement announcing his retirement, issued in June by his publicist Leslee Dart, was intended to draw a line and avoid being sucked back into another project. “All my life, I’ve mouthed off about how I should stop acting, and I don’t know why it was different this time, but the impulse to quit took root in me, and that became a compulsion. It was something I had to do.”
The star of My Left Foot and The Last of the Mohicans said: “Do I feel better? Not yet. I have great sadness. And that’s the right way to feel. How strange would it be if this was just a gleeful step into a brand-new life.”
In Phantom Thread, DayLewis plays Reynolds Woodcock, a high-society dressmaker in post-war London whose world is transformed when he falls in love.
According to the New York Post, DayLewis fell in love with dressmaking while fastidiously researching and immersing himself in the world of couture fashion in preparation for the film. He apparently took to the profession so much that he’s decided to jump into it full-time.
As far-fetched as it may sound, it’s not a world away from Day-Lewis’s profession in the late ’90s, when he withdrew from acting to become a shoemaker, working as apprentice to the Italian master cobbler Stefano Bemer.
A source also told the newspaper that Day-Lewis had been planning to retire from acting for several years, but wished to wait until he found a final project worthy of being his last hurrah.
“He’s so method, it takes him three years to prepare for a role,” the source said. “He was telling friends he wanted to go out with a bang.”
Day-Lewis is famed for his dedication to method acting, which has involved immersing himself in the behaviours and skills of his characters, and refusing to break character while on set.
Notable examples include being spoonfed and carried around on the set of My Left Foot while playing Irish artist and writer Christy Brown, who had cerebral palsy, and living in the bush while preparing for The Last of the Mohicans.
When he’s not acting, Day-Lewis lives with his family on a 20ha farm in County Wicklow, south of Dublin, where he has taken up rural hobbies including stonemasonry.
Day-Lewis says he remains essentially English, having been born in Greenwich, London, the son of Cecil Day-Lewis, a poet laureate.
“I don’t know why, but suddenly I had a strong wish to tell an English story,” he told W magazine.
“England is deep in me. I’m made of that stuff. For a long time, a film set in England was too close to the world that I’d escaped from — drawing rooms, classic Shakespeare.
“But I was fascinated by London after the war. My parents told stories about living through the Blitz, and I felt like I ingested that. I am sentimental about that world. And my dad was very much like Reynolds Woodcock. If a poet is not self-absorbed, what else is he?”
Day-Lewis has not yet seen his latest and last film, something he links to his decision to stop acting. Now he wants to “explore the world in a different way”.
‘The impulse to quit took root, and that became a compulsion. It was something I had to do’